was at hand; though it still mewed urgently, every few seconds, with one paw pitifully uplifted in expectation.
Timothy selected a long thin blade from the hundreds on the Swiss knife. ‘Come and hold the torch, Mum,’ he said. ‘No, steadier than that. Use both your hands!’
‘Oh, come on, I’ll do it,’ said Jane, taking the torch from her. ‘You’re a proper wet lettuce, Mum.’
Rose sat down again. She would never understand the rising generation. They seemed so utterly heartless. Without feeling. Only concerned with how much is it? Or, is there a quick kick in it? Debunking, cynical, on to the next cheap thrill.
Nor could she understand her own cowardice. Sitting at a safe distance while her two children were about to be fallen on by a long-dead corpse, a member of the living dead, or even a vampire . . .
The knife scrawped; the lock clicked. The tall door swung open, sending a great shadow as of death sweeping across the torchlit room.
And there was a smell, a dusty smell, a sweet smell, a sour smell, an infinitely evil smell.
‘Oh,’ said Jane, her voice sagging in disappointment. ‘Just jars. Books and jars. All that fuss over a few books and jars . . .’
‘This one’s got frogs in,’ said Timothy hopefully. ‘Dead frogs.’
‘We’ve got those in the bio lab at school,’ said Jane dismissively. ‘Anyway, they’re toads.’
‘And there’s newts,’ said Timothy. ‘And I think those are animals’ eyes . . .’ Hope of horrors still lingered in his voice.
‘I don’t like biology, it’s yuk,’ said Jane. ‘We had to dissect a frog at school and mine was a female full of eggs. I spent a whole morning scraping out the eggs, and then we had tapioca for school dinner . . . I’m off to bed. Have a nice supper! It’s lovely having a kinky brother . . .’
‘Who says I’m kinky?’
‘Half the girls in my class. I’ve had fights with girls who called you kinky. I needn’t have bothered. They’re right.’ She blundered away into the dark, tripping on one of the middle stairs in the process, and saying something that in happier circumstances Rose would have found quite unforgivable.
‘Ey, Mum,’ said Tim, grasping for a new ally. ‘There’s some jolly odd stuff in here. I think there’s a baby in one of these jars . . .’
‘Oh, what rubbish,’ said Rose, starting forward. ‘Really, Tim, you’re quite impossible.’
‘No, look!’
Reluctantly, she went forward. In the light of his torch, the dead frogs, frozen in the act of leaping, in their prison bath of dirty formalin, looked at her appealingly, still yearning for freedom and life outside the jar. The newts looked more reconciled to their fate, grim and nearly asleep. But the creature in the black jar, with its bulging forehead and never-opened eyes, its tiny budlike arms and legs . . .
‘It must be a chimpanzee foetus or something,’ said Rose desperately.
‘Go on,’ said her son heartlessly. ‘It’s human. The Sunday supplements are full of them. I wonder where he got it?’
‘I think we ought to go to bed,’ said Rose. It was the only sensible thought she could pluck from her churning mind.
Her son eyed her acutely. In the upward light of the torch, he looked . . . unearthly. Like a . . . not a devil, but a rather scary angel. Beautiful, and yet . . . unknowable, with his high forehead and large observant eyes. It had never occurred to her before that angels like Michael and Gabriel could be a bit scary. But after all, they had to put down devils, trample them under their feet . . .
‘He was a funny old bloke, Mum, wasn’t he? Sepp Yaxley, I mean. I wonder what really happened to him . . .’
‘Bed,’ said Rose firmly. It took some courage, after what she’d been through, to say ‘bed’ firmly to an avenging angel. So they went to bed; and that other avenging angel, the cat, was nowhere to be seen.
Eight
Contrary to her expectations of nightmares about frogs and embryos, Rose slept the dreamless sleep of a log, and stumbled downstairs next morning, feeling half-dead. She found the kids, perversely, in excellent spirits, sitting by the window in the sunshine, Jane with the cat in her lap. The devil of the night before gave her a wary look. It obviously had not forgotten the tennis-racket. But Jane went on stroking it, and said, rather meaningfully, ‘It’s all right, puss. Mum didn’t mean it. She’s quite